Nuclear Startups We’d Trust With a Real Reactor

TerraPower has patient capital, an experienced team and an active Natrium project in Wyoming. The long preparation makes its schedule more credible than most.

Radiant is developing a portable microreactor aimed at remote sites and military users now dependent on diesel. Mobility gives the design an obvious purpose.

Antares is designing a compact gas-cooled reactor for military and remote applications. A customer that values resilience can tolerate economics ordinary utilities would reject.

Aalo plans factory-produced sodium-cooled reactors beside data centers. Repetition could lower costs, but the factory only helps after licenses and orders arrive.

Last Energy proposes small pressurized-water plants assembled from standardized modules. Using familiar reactor physics reduces one risk while leaving project economics exposed.

Newcleo combines lead-cooled fast reactors with recycled nuclear fuel. The European plan is technically distinctive and financially demanding.

Kairos is building successive test reactors before its commercial fluoride-salt-cooled design. That staged licensing strategy gives regulators and engineers something concrete to inspect.

X-energy pairs small high-temperature gas reactors with industrial customers and its own fuel program. Process heat gives the design a market beyond electricity.

Oklo wants to sell power rather than reactors from compact fast reactors using recycled fuel. The business model is bold, though the schedule still asks for faith.

BWXT has decades of naval nuclear and fuel experience, making it less startup-like and far more credible at manufacturing difficult hardware.